Red Herring – Joanne Coates - Timespan
Source: https://timespan.org.uk/programme/exhibitions/red-herring-joanne-coates
Archived: 2026-04-23 17:15
Red Herring – Joanne Coates - Timespan
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The weather in Helmsdale:
5°C
/
Broken clouds
We are open everyday 10am-5pm
We are excited to present a new exhibition by visual artist Joanne Coates.
Red Herring
explores the overlooked histories of women’s labour and class solidarity through the legacy of the Herring Girls—an itinerant all-female workforce central to the fishing industry between the 18th and 20th centuries. Developed during a six-month residency at Timespan in Helmsdale, the project is grounded in archival research, community collaboration and Coates’ lived experience as a working-class artist.
Red Herring
brings to light the stories of the Herring Girls—also known as Gutting Girls or Herring Lasses—who travelled seasonally to coastal towns gutting and packing fish. Often underpaid, injured, and working in harsh conditions, these women formed complex communities that carved out independence in a male-dominated public space. A key moment of collective resistance—the 1936 Great Yarmouth strike—is highlighted in the exhibition as an overlooked instance of working-class protofeminist organising.
The exhibition’s central photographic series sees Coates reenacting the gestures, routines, and acts of care that defined the Gutting Girls’ daily lives, using her own body as a site of inquiry. These coexist with archival photos from Timespan and Shetland Museum and Archives collections to re-examine historical imagery of the gutting girls—not simply as documentary evidence but as constructed representations. As historical photography often framed rural working-class women as passive and content, it fed into gendered representations of class that persist today. Coates disrupts these representations, instead presenting working-class women’s labour as an active and complex struggle in the series
Labour Pains
(2025),
Submerge
(2024),
Trajicere
(2024), and
Involvo
(2024).
Situated in Helmsdale, a village historically shaped by the Highland Clearances and the transatlantic herring trade, the exhibition explores how local histories connect to global systems of colonialism and labour extraction. Coates expands this analysis by including photographs from the State Archives of North Carolina, drawing transatlantic parallels between racialised labour in fish processing and Scottish herring workers.
Exhibition view courtesy of Ruth Clark
Exhibition view courtesy of Ruth Clark
Joanne Coates, Barbed, 2025. Wall vinyl, 100 x 131cm
Exhibition view courtesy of Ruth Clark
Joanne Coates, Submerge i, 2024. Photograph printed on Ilford Prestige Smooth Pearl. 25.4 x 30.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Joanne Coates, Flirting with class, 2025. 5 ceramics, 75mm x 63mm
Exhibition view courtesy of Ruth Clark
Joanne Coates, Trajicere i, 2024. Photograph printed on Ilford Prestige Smooth Pearl. 25.4 x 30.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Exhibition view courtesy of Ruth Clark
Three Women Herring Gutters July 1884. Wick Society, Johnston Photographic Collection
Exhibition view courtesy of Ruth Clark
Industrious fisher girls, Lerwick, Shetland, date unknown. Photo: author unknown
Exhibition view courtesy of Ruth Clark
A herring gutting scene at Helmsdale in the 1930s, Credit Christine Cowie.
Exhibition view courtesy of Ruth Clark
Joanne Coates, Labour pains, 2025. Photograph printed on Ilford Prestige Smooth Pearl. 20.3 x 25.4 cm. Courtesy the artist.
Joanne Coates, Triangulation, 2025. Lightbox, 173x120cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Timespan’s facade courtesy of Ruth Clark
Joanne Coates, The Lasses, 2025 Designed pattern printed on a billboard, 320×158.5cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Exhibition view courtesy of Ruth Clark
Exhibition view courtesy of Ruth Clark
The exhibition presents another new commission,
Herring Crown
(2025) created in collaboration with Helmsdale Primary School. This sculptural work reimagines the tradition of crowning a Herring Queen to celebrate women’s labour. Visitors will be invited to wear the crown and have their portrait taken by the artist during public sessions on
20th–22nd June 2025
as part of the
Salt & Silver
symposium and during the
Herring Crown Parade on 16 August 2025
. These portraits will form part of a living archive of Helmsdale’s residents and visitors.
Red Herring
highlights the long-overlooked contributions of working-class women’s labour. It invites us to reconsider how these stories have been told, recognise their significance, and reflect on the persistent impact of class and gender inequality in shaping the world women live in today.
Curated by Giulia Gregnanin, supported by Creative Scotland, The Highland Council Ward Discretionary Fund, and the Foyle Foundation.
With thanks to: The children of Helmsdale Primary School, and jewellery maker and designer Patricia Niemann for their incredible work. Christine, Shelly, Amy, Tessa, Dawn, Isla, Aileen, Rosa, Donna, Jamie, Tracey, Caroline, Jacquie, and Giulia—without whom this project would not have been possible. A special thank you to the archives supporting this work with their collections: Nucleus: The Nuclear and Caithness Archives, Waterlines Heritage Centre, Shetland Museum and Archives, North Carolina State Archives, Aberdeen City Archives, and The Johnston Collection.
Joanne Coates
is a working class visual artist using the medium of photography. She lives and works across the North East of England. Her work explores rurality, hidden histories, and inequalities relating to low income through photography, installations, and audio. She uses photography to question stories around power, identity, wealth, and poverty. She was first educated in working-class communities, and then at London College of Communication (BA Hons Photography). Participation and working with communities are an important aspect of her work. Coates is a farm labourer practicing active nature friendly methods, this forms an intersection with her art.
She is deeply attached to places, the memories they hold and the people who inhabit them. Her work is often made from a lived experience perspective touching on class, disability and gender. In 2024 Coates was appointed UK House of Commons Election Artist for 2024 exploring, known for her compelling explorations of rural life, class, and environmental issues. In 2023, she was awarded the Baltic Vasseur Arts Award, resulting in, The Middle of Somewhere, addressing housing, climate, and the countryside. The work was long-listed for the Deutsche Borse prize. In 2021 she was awarded The Jerwood / Photoworks award.Her pieces are often presented in site-specific rural contexts and are part of permanent collections, including those of MIMA, Arts Council Collection and the Government Art Collection.
Press
The Skinny
Red Herring: Joanne Coates and the Herring Girls
Scottish Art News
Artist Spotlight: Joanne Coates
BBC Alba
Interview with Joanne Coates
BBC Gaelic
Calmachd Clann-Nighean an Sgadain a chaidh air an casan airson cothromachd
BBC Radio Scotland
The Arts Mix interview with Joanne Coates
BBC Woman’s Hour
Interview with Joanne Coates about Red Herring
The Herald
Great Exhibitions to See this Week
Caught by the River
Red Herring by Joanne Coates
Northern Times
New exhibition at Timespan in Helmsdale celebrates the ‘Herring Girls’
Exhibition Booklet
Press Inquiries
Event
Summer Season and Red Herring Opening
Skip to content
The weather in Helmsdale:
5°C
/
Broken clouds
We are open everyday 10am-5pm
We are excited to present a new exhibition by visual artist Joanne Coates.
Red Herring
explores the overlooked histories of women’s labour and class solidarity through the legacy of the Herring Girls—an itinerant all-female workforce central to the fishing industry between the 18th and 20th centuries. Developed during a six-month residency at Timespan in Helmsdale, the project is grounded in archival research, community collaboration and Coates’ lived experience as a working-class artist.
Red Herring
brings to light the stories of the Herring Girls—also known as Gutting Girls or Herring Lasses—who travelled seasonally to coastal towns gutting and packing fish. Often underpaid, injured, and working in harsh conditions, these women formed complex communities that carved out independence in a male-dominated public space. A key moment of collective resistance—the 1936 Great Yarmouth strike—is highlighted in the exhibition as an overlooked instance of working-class protofeminist organising.
The exhibition’s central photographic series sees Coates reenacting the gestures, routines, and acts of care that defined the Gutting Girls’ daily lives, using her own body as a site of inquiry. These coexist with archival photos from Timespan and Shetland Museum and Archives collections to re-examine historical imagery of the gutting girls—not simply as documentary evidence but as constructed representations. As historical photography often framed rural working-class women as passive and content, it fed into gendered representations of class that persist today. Coates disrupts these representations, instead presenting working-class women’s labour as an active and complex struggle in the series
Labour Pains
(2025),
Submerge
(2024),
Trajicere
(2024), and
Involvo
(2024).
Situated in Helmsdale, a village historically shaped by the Highland Clearances and the transatlantic herring trade, the exhibition explores how local histories connect to global systems of colonialism and labour extraction. Coates expands this analysis by including photographs from the State Archives of North Carolina, drawing transatlantic parallels between racialised labour in fish processing and Scottish herring workers.
Exhibition view courtesy of Ruth Clark
Exhibition view courtesy of Ruth Clark
Joanne Coates, Barbed, 2025. Wall vinyl, 100 x 131cm
Exhibition view courtesy of Ruth Clark
Joanne Coates, Submerge i, 2024. Photograph printed on Ilford Prestige Smooth Pearl. 25.4 x 30.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Joanne Coates, Flirting with class, 2025. 5 ceramics, 75mm x 63mm
Exhibition view courtesy of Ruth Clark
Joanne Coates, Trajicere i, 2024. Photograph printed on Ilford Prestige Smooth Pearl. 25.4 x 30.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Exhibition view courtesy of Ruth Clark
Three Women Herring Gutters July 1884. Wick Society, Johnston Photographic Collection
Exhibition view courtesy of Ruth Clark
Industrious fisher girls, Lerwick, Shetland, date unknown. Photo: author unknown
Exhibition view courtesy of Ruth Clark
A herring gutting scene at Helmsdale in the 1930s, Credit Christine Cowie.
Exhibition view courtesy of Ruth Clark
Joanne Coates, Labour pains, 2025. Photograph printed on Ilford Prestige Smooth Pearl. 20.3 x 25.4 cm. Courtesy the artist.
Joanne Coates, Triangulation, 2025. Lightbox, 173x120cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Timespan’s facade courtesy of Ruth Clark
Joanne Coates, The Lasses, 2025 Designed pattern printed on a billboard, 320×158.5cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Exhibition view courtesy of Ruth Clark
Exhibition view courtesy of Ruth Clark
The exhibition presents another new commission,
Herring Crown
(2025) created in collaboration with Helmsdale Primary School. This sculptural work reimagines the tradition of crowning a Herring Queen to celebrate women’s labour. Visitors will be invited to wear the crown and have their portrait taken by the artist during public sessions on
20th–22nd June 2025
as part of the
Salt & Silver
symposium and during the
Herring Crown Parade on 16 August 2025
. These portraits will form part of a living archive of Helmsdale’s residents and visitors.
Red Herring
highlights the long-overlooked contributions of working-class women’s labour. It invites us to reconsider how these stories have been told, recognise their significance, and reflect on the persistent impact of class and gender inequality in shaping the world women live in today.
Curated by Giulia Gregnanin, supported by Creative Scotland, The Highland Council Ward Discretionary Fund, and the Foyle Foundation.
With thanks to: The children of Helmsdale Primary School, and jewellery maker and designer Patricia Niemann for their incredible work. Christine, Shelly, Amy, Tessa, Dawn, Isla, Aileen, Rosa, Donna, Jamie, Tracey, Caroline, Jacquie, and Giulia—without whom this project would not have been possible. A special thank you to the archives supporting this work with their collections: Nucleus: The Nuclear and Caithness Archives, Waterlines Heritage Centre, Shetland Museum and Archives, North Carolina State Archives, Aberdeen City Archives, and The Johnston Collection.
Joanne Coates
is a working class visual artist using the medium of photography. She lives and works across the North East of England. Her work explores rurality, hidden histories, and inequalities relating to low income through photography, installations, and audio. She uses photography to question stories around power, identity, wealth, and poverty. She was first educated in working-class communities, and then at London College of Communication (BA Hons Photography). Participation and working with communities are an important aspect of her work. Coates is a farm labourer practicing active nature friendly methods, this forms an intersection with her art.
She is deeply attached to places, the memories they hold and the people who inhabit them. Her work is often made from a lived experience perspective touching on class, disability and gender. In 2024 Coates was appointed UK House of Commons Election Artist for 2024 exploring, known for her compelling explorations of rural life, class, and environmental issues. In 2023, she was awarded the Baltic Vasseur Arts Award, resulting in, The Middle of Somewhere, addressing housing, climate, and the countryside. The work was long-listed for the Deutsche Borse prize. In 2021 she was awarded The Jerwood / Photoworks award.Her pieces are often presented in site-specific rural contexts and are part of permanent collections, including those of MIMA, Arts Council Collection and the Government Art Collection.
Press
The Skinny
Red Herring: Joanne Coates and the Herring Girls
Scottish Art News
Artist Spotlight: Joanne Coates
BBC Alba
Interview with Joanne Coates
BBC Gaelic
Calmachd Clann-Nighean an Sgadain a chaidh air an casan airson cothromachd
BBC Radio Scotland
The Arts Mix interview with Joanne Coates
BBC Woman’s Hour
Interview with Joanne Coates about Red Herring
The Herald
Great Exhibitions to See this Week
Caught by the River
Red Herring by Joanne Coates
Northern Times
New exhibition at Timespan in Helmsdale celebrates the ‘Herring Girls’
Exhibition Booklet
Press Inquiries
Event
Summer Season and Red Herring Opening